Taking Photographic Liberties

One of the problems with digital cameras, mobiles, tablets is that they have removed the element of cost. Once upon a time, in the days of everyone using film, a fair degree of discretion was required. Don't go wasting a shot, because you've not only paid to take it, you will also have to pay to print it. There was also the limited number of shots per reel. That little counter would click ominously towards zero. Digital has thus dispensed with discretion, as storage has multiplied astronomically the number of shots at the photographer's disposal. What did it used to be? Typically thirty, something like that?

While there are clearly enormous advantages from digital, there are also the downsides. One of these is if you happen to be unfortunate enough to be the victim of someone who insists on showing you the entire catalogue of snaps of their holiday or simply their day out.

Yes, it's happened to me, as it has no doubt happened to you. Visitor X pitches up, produces the digital device and hotfoots it to the nearest seaside location. On return, there are hundreds of items of evidence of the excursion. How many times can one person take roughly the same photo of, say, Puerto Pollensa's pinewalk or boats in the Alcudiamar? Hundreds indeed. It's not a case so much of familiarity with the subject breeding contempt as of ennui. For God's sake, whatever you do, don't show me another damn snap of part of a pine tree hanging in the foreground against the backdrop of Pollensa Bay.

Among this mountainous archive of the repetitious can occasionally be the unfamiliar. "Look at the composition with the bougainvillea," announces Visitor X with a passion that is sadly difficult to reciprocate. "Oh yes, lovely." It's not the bougainvillea which is unfamiliar - there's enough of that around to fill the entire digital storage capacity of all devices for sale in a large electronics retail outlet. It's what the bougainvillea belongs to. Someone's house.

Although never having been so uncharitable as to say so, my reaction to photos of people's property is always the same: is it not just a little bit intrusive? Often has been the time when I've seen a tourist stop and snap a villa, its garden, its bougainvillea. I have also seen tourists help themselves to conveniently unlocked gates. Getting nearer does so help with composition, doesn't it.

A former neighbour of mine once grew so sick and tired of her property being invaded that she had a wall built. I never found out, but the town hall probably eventually latched onto this and slapped a fine for not having got permission; that's the sort of thing town halls do. But the obstacle of a wall became necessary in the quest for privacy and indeed non-trespass.

While I suppose I can understand the impulse to photograph houses, villas, gardens and what have you - there are, after all, some fabulous properties knocking around - I'm not one of those inclined to do so. It can seem like taking a bit of a liberty, and an even greater one if the photographing involves wandering across somebody's lawn.

It can seem that everything is fair game for the digital snapper, who then decides to take advantage of another great digital downside: the sheer inability to not then share the photo on social networks. Which brings me to Wikiloc.

If you are unfamiliar with Wikiloc, I should explain that it is a social network community for those who wish to share routes (walking, cycling, what have you) and geolocate them for digital devices. Which is all fair enough. Part of this route-sharing frenzy can be and is the use of photos. Well, of course, if you want to show a route, it's not much use if you can't actually see it.

But lurking within this route-sharing is potential intrusiveness, and so into this story enters the case of the Fartàrix finca in Pollensa. The administrator of this finca insisted that an image of the actual building be removed from Wikiloc. A hiker had uploaded it, and the administrator said that it was a violation of data protection law and of privacy. The hiker responded by pointing out that the landscape belongs to everyone and so can be photographed, which wasn't what the administrator was driving at. The photo in question couldn't have been taken from the public way. It could only have been taken from the garden.

I don't know that photographing a property can constitute a breach of data protection law, but sharing it may do; m'learned friends would know better than me. Trespass is another matter. So all in all, good on the finca administrator. The only trouble is of course that people now know about the finca; I, for one, had never previously heard of it.

The British Abroad: In images

I didn't know the name Peter Dench until the other day. Many of you may not have known his name. Which is not to say that Peter Dench is not well-known. He is. In the world of photojournalism, that is.

Because of where we are - Mallorca; because of what we all know - Magalluf and its attendant attractions; because of the insatiable appetite of journalism in its different guises to record the moments, we are presented with an example of Peter Dench's work. Bloke on holiday. Brit bloke on holiday. Brit bloke slumped over a wall. A Magalluf wall. We don't know quite how old Brit bloke is. It's hard to say when he's face down and enquiries are being made as to his well-being by a passing and caring female who seems to be in the wrong resort. The only surprise with the photo was that Brit bloke still had his shorts on. That's Magalluf for you. Usually. Keeled over and kit off.

Taken as a single image, the photo could have been misconstrued as merely another attempt to exploit the Magalluf reputation and present it to the world in the name of journalism. A single image that could have been taken a thousand times. And not just in Magalluf. But the single image needs to be considered within the context of the whole Peter Dench oeuvre. He records Englishness and Britishness. Warts and all, but principally the warts.

The Sony World Photography Awards are broken down into numerous categories. One of them is Daily Life within a wider category of Documentary and itself under the heading of Professional. Among the Daily Life nominees are, for example, Espen Rasmussen with "The Curse of Coal". And then there is Peter Dench, "The British Abroad".

The very title gives the game away. "The British Abroad" presupposes a type of Brit. The legend immediately suggests that this is Brit abroad of a less than wholly edifying nature. It is a title that has been with us pretty much since mass tourism jetted into the skies in the early 1960s. Brits abroad have always been, variously, uncouth, ill-educated, slobs, drunks, xenophobes, small-minded. Brits abroad have long required low-lying walls, designed and built by tourist authorities to permit being slumped over following the intake of a year's worth of alcohol in one night.

The only variables within this generic are those of age. Brit abroad doesn't necessarily grow old gracefully. Indeed, quite the contrary. But for the marketers, this particular segment of the Brit market can only be defined, apart from age, by its lower ratings in the ABC socioeconomic scheme of things. Lower in fact. Here are Huxley's Deltas and Epsilons. These are non-beings in the new schemata of, for example, the marketing brains trust of Meliá New Town, the brave new world of As and B+s, segmented in their own ways, such as by membership of the Millennial Generation, one in which all youthful(ish) tourists have excellent dental work, surf the artificial surf and that of the internet, are attached permanently to social networks and want for no more than a glass of extraordinarily expensive sparkling water.

These new-age beings do not, therefore, inhabit the stereotypical land of The British Abroad. They do not conform with an image that has been carved out with such mindless dedication over decades. But were they to be the subject of an alternative exercise in photojournalism, they would likewise be a kind of pastiche but within its own narrow terms of reference. And that's because there have to be certain defining images, ones that make sense and have coherence as being representative in order to be displayed to the world, be it via Sony awards or otherwise.

For all this, and in the context of Magalluf, it needs to be said that The British Abroad is an evolving being. And it is here where I have to question Peter Dench. Not because of his fine work, not because of his excellent eye and composition, not because of the virtues of photographically capturing images that together create a powerful representation of a particular strand of British existence.

A collection of The British Abroad, replete with bloke in tutu standing on a balcony, Bollocks Karaoke Pub and others, that is on a Getty website carries a description and explanation: The Dench Diary Foreign Special. It is the written support to the images, some of which are from Magalluf (others are from elsewhere, such as Ibiza). The feature, this collection of images, comes from spring-summer 2012 and 2013. It is this, therefore, that I question. We've moved on. Haven't we? Why drag out the bloke on the wall now?

This is not to say that all has changed in Magalluf. But can the imagery be said to deal with the passé? Or will The British Abroad always be with us?

Historical Records: Mallorca in photos

Every picture tells a story. Today's obsession with social networks is both positive and less positive. Among all the vanity stuff, the endless selfies and plates of breakfast and Sunday roast, there are the endless treasures of landscapes, seascapes and buildings. But even these can have their monotony factor. However good the photo might be, yet more shots of Pollensa's Calvari, Palma's Cathedral or Cala Tuent are just that - yet more shots. There is nothing that isn't photographed - both well and not well - and uploaded to social media.

It didn't of course used to be like this. The scarcity of photographic evidence made what there was the very essence of historical treasure. Contemporary overfamiliarity lessens the impact. Much of today's photography - the stuff which can typify social media at any rate - lacks durability. This is not historical record for future generations, simply the deployment of technologies in the here and now.

A photographic exhibition has been ongoing since the end of October. It has now moved from the Archduke Louis Salvador building at the university to the same institution's Sa Riera. It will finish in mid-February. Its title is "Tourism in the Balearic and Pityusic Islands: A brief graphic history". Its very title is somewhat odd but also significant. The Balearics is a generic name for an archipelago that comprises the Gymnesian and Pityusic Islands: Mallorca and Menorca and Ibiza and Formentera. The Balearics is the catch-all. How often is the antiquity of the real island names referred to?

A publicity leaflet for this exhibition is itself somewhat odd. Its main image shows a dockside. There is an old post office (Correos) van parked next to what looks as though it may be a large fishing boat. A car is being winched onto the boat. It doesn't somehow seem representative of tourism, yet it probably was. It was taken in Palma in 1956. The photographer was Tom Weedon. This British resident of Fornalutx is one of the key names in Mallorca's photographic past. In October 2013, an exhibition of his work was opened at Palma's La Misericòrdia. Two years later, virtually to the day, the university's exhibition opened, with Weedon's curious Palma dockside photo assuming pride of publicity place.

Quirky and unexpected, the photo captures more than just a tourism past. Vehicles, people, technology, view: they are essential ingredients of excellent historical record, the scarce resource which, when it is made available, will always have the potential to intrigue and fascinate.

There is something else that is odd about the exhibition. Awareness of it has been limited. I came across it thanks to, yes, social media. I can't recall there having been any particular announcements or fuss made about it. And yet the title makes clear that here is a collection for something that is endlessly fascinating: Mallorca's past.

Of other images, there is one for two gentlemen in bathing costumes taken at the balneario in El Terreno in either 1919 or 1920. Here, El Terreno, is where tourism, more in the style of foreign residential tourism, was centred. There is a further one of a shanty town that was taken in 1966. It was situated by the Can Pere Antoni beach in Palma. Its significance is immense. Such shanties used to exist, side by side with tourism development. Some housed workers who were employed in building, while others were for the poor. One of the abiding images I have of the first time I came to Mallorca was of a small shanty at the back of the hotel we stayed at in Arenal.

The specific source from social media that led me to find out about this exhibition was the Facebook page for Fotos Antiguas de Mallorca. This, together with a separate blog, is the most remarkable single photographic resource devoted to Mallorca's past, and not only tourism past. A labour of social media love, it throws up the occasional teases or questions. Where is this a photo of? A recent black-and-white one shows a cove with a handful of buildings and a mountain in the background. It isn't said when it was taken, but the answers as to where it is are varied: Camp de Mar, Colonia Sant Pere, Cala Agulla. The more likely answer is Cala Barques in Cala Sant Vicenç.

The Balearic tourism ministry wishes to use some of the revenue raised by the tourist tax to assist in preservation of the islands' heritage. This ministry has, however, and via its promotional wings, consistently failed in presenting this heritage, through photography and other media, to a tourist public. Old talk of a tourism museum was only ever talk: it never happened. If it believes in heritage, it should make an award to Fotos Antiguas de Mallorca.

Before And After: Mallorca Observed

The photo was taken in the 1960s. By today's standards, its colour was not well defined and indeed the colour was partly unnecessary as much of the land was, in any event, grey. It was an aerial photo of what was to become the City of Lakes in Alcúdia. The greyness, with tinges of brown but an almost total absence of green, was marked with the boundaries of plots. Here were to be buildings: hotels, apartments, villas, houses, restaurants, bars, shops. There were few landmarks on the photo. The Boccaccio apartments were there; they had arrived some time before the hotel of the same name. What were to be named the Ciudad Blanca apartments by the beach could be detected. Otherwise, there was little that stood out.

Today, if there were to be a similar photo, you would probably be unable to distinguish the Boccaccio apartments. They aren't much to look at anyway, but a claim can be made for their history, one that is longer than most of the City of Lakes. As for the Ciudad Blanca apartments, not many people realise they are apartments or that they were the first apartments to be built in this part of Alcúdia (right at the start of the 1960s). Are they not just a part of the hotel with the same name? Well no, not really. They occupy the same large plot but they were there many years before the hotel was built.

Had a photo been taken some thirty years before, the view would have been different. The reclamation of Albufera - the greyness of the photo can be attributed to the ash from the power station that was used for this reclamation - had only been partial. It might have been possible to see the old golf course, the old pumping station, the road that ran parallel to the coast. There wouldn't have been other roads, except for one or two tracks. There wouldn't, for example, have been the rudimentary street of the 1960s photo that was named after one of those who had been responsible for the first phase of Alcudia's transformation in the 1930s - Pedro Mas y Reus. And had there been a photo some thirty years before this, there would have been nothing, save for the track that was the coastal road and vast acres of wetland.

The reason for mentioning the Alcúdia photo is that it was taken at a time when the change to the landscape was only just beginning. This was to be a change that was absolute. The City of Lakes, the Venice of Mallorca as it was claimed it would be, was the largest single urban tourism development undertaken in Mallorca. Much of the island's coastal areas was subject to similar development, but not on the scale - for a single project - as was the case in Alcúdia. The photo represents a transitory phase in the before and after: it is one of the more striking of the "befores" or "in-betweens", if you prefer.

There is an abundance of photographic records of how Mallorca once looked. Much of this, especially because of social media, has been brought into the public domain. Resorts, as they were, are there for all to see. But these photos become most striking - poignant even - when they are compared with the current day. That track is now a main road. That field is now a hotel. That small shop which once sold milk is now a hypermarket.

I have recently been involved in a project about the Tramuntana mountains. A key point about this is the fact that, despite human intervention over many centuries, the mountains have not been harmed. Indeed, where this intervention has occurred, it has been beneficial in giving the mountains the characteristics they now have. But then, mountains are mountains. They are not, generally speaking, conducive to mass urbanisation. They are also obstinately irremovable.

The same cannot be said for wetlands, fields, dunes, forests of the sort that once proliferated in greater abundance than they now do. This is not a criticism, it is a statement of fact: something (or some things) had to give way in order that Mallorca could have its tourism, its economic development and its industrial revolution.

For all that today's tourists benefit from this transformation, there are many who are fascinated by how things were. It is an interest driven by curiosity rather than sadness necessarily. Before and after is fascinating. It is why talk in the past of a tourism museum for Mallorca should have been much more than talk. But there is, by way of compensation, that abundance of photographic evidence now available. And there are also co-ordinated projects designed to demonstrate the before and after. Jaume Gual is a photographer who has been involved in such projects. Urban scenes, rural scenes, he specialises in Mallorca's before and after.

"El Paistage Observat", the landscape observed, is a collection of art held by the Council of Mallorca and photos by Jaume Gual. It shows how painting and photography contrasts but also how scenes now contrast. As part of the PalmaPhoto season, the exhibition is at Palma's La Misericordia Cultural Centre.

Photographer And Priest: Catany Foundation

It was said of Toni Catany that he drew inspiration from a priest, Father Tomas Monserrat, in his home town of Llucmajor. The priest was also a photographer, one who recorded rural and pre-industrial life as it was in Llucmajor and Mallorca from the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Toni Catany rescued some of this historical photographic evidence. He was to publish a tribute to the priest in 1983, "Portrait of a Village (1933-1944)".

Catany would have struggled to really have known the priest, but Monserrat would almost certainly have known him. Catany was born in 1942; the priest died in 1944. They were, to all intents and purposes, neighbours. The priest's house was in a different street (Convent) to that of the Catany family (Cardenal Rossell), but it was on the corner of the Cardenal Rossell. The Catany home was on the corner of Convent.

This proximity was doubtless an important factor in Catany having been influenced by Monserrat. It was an influence that was to take him to Barcelona, to Israel, to Egypt, to the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. He was based in Barcelona from 1960, but he never forgot his home town and home island. Before he died in 2013, he had made provision for his legacy and that of Tomas Monserrat to be preserved: in Llucmajor, in the old houses where one had died and the other had been born. The project for this preservation has yet to be realised.

The American "Life" magazine once named Catany among its 100 greatest photographers in the world, and he was honoured by the governments of both the Balearics and Catalonia. His was a photography that was as diverse as it was original - portraits, landscapes, the surreal, nudes, still life (as in vases of flowers for example), journalistic. It was a photography that he wished to bequeath to Mallorca, and in October 2013, he had been due to fly from Barcelona to the island with plans for the photographic centre project. These plans had been packed into his suitcase. He never made the journey. He died of a heart attack.

These plans were, however, only the latest for a project that had been conceived some years earlier. In 2007, with the backing of the town hall in Llucmajor and of the Council of Mallorca, the process was set in motion for the creation of the Toni Catany Foundation. Three years later, the legal framework for this had been agreed to by the two authorities, the Council, in the meantime, having acquired both the house of Tomas Monserrat and the Catany family home. Catany himself would supply all his photographic legacy, which was to include cameras as well as photographs, negatives, you name it, plus work by other photographers.

The Council had been in receipt of 4.3 million euros, funds that had been supplied by Turespaña, the national agency for tourism, and channelled through the regional government. This was in 2009. By June 2013, not long before he died, Catany wrote to the Council. To say that he was disappointed was probably an understatement. Nothing had happened, yet the project had been officially announced and architects' plans (which can be viewed on the internet) had been drawn up.

In April of this year, executors of his will and therefore members of the foundation were baffled when they learned of a decision of the Council's to release a million euros for the redevelopment of Monserrat's house. They were baffled because no one at the Council had apparently been in contact with them. The trustees were not objecting to work being done, they were just alarmed by the fact that they were not being informed. The Council's view was that, as it was now the owner of the house, it would go ahead with the bidding process for the redevelopment.

At least, however, something finally seemed to be moving, but the tardiness that the Council of Mallorca has shown over something that is a statutory investment (backed by the money that had been forthcoming in 2009) is something that the left-wing parties which seem poised to take over at the Council will address: they have said that such investments in the island's culture, like the Catany foundation, will be fulfilled.

The point is that one of the key reasons for the existence of the Council is a responsibility for the island's culture. Economic crisis will of course be cited in mitigation, and Maria Salom, on becoming president in 2011, was faced with a Council with huge debts. But the funding was expressly made available. With any luck the vision of Toni Catany will now be realised in the not-too-distant future and his legacy will be there for all to see.

* As part of the PalmaPhoto season, there will be a documentary film about Catany at the Cineciutat, 25 June at 10pm.

Photos Of Pollensa: Guillem Bestard

There is a black-and-white photo of Cala San Vicente rock and cliff formations that dates back to 1930. The photo was part of a series that the national tourism directorate commissioned between 1928 and 1936 and which is called the "Catálogo Monumental de España". The catalogue comprises 3,861 photographs of different places in Spain, all of them related to tourism. It, in turn, forms part of the national tourism patronage series - a colossal archive of posters, brochures, leaflets and photos. It has over 80,000 photos in all.

The Cala San Vicente photo is notable as much for its quality as it is for the name of the photographer. No photographic record of Cala San Vicente, of Pollensa, of Mallorca would be complete without works by Guillem Bestard. Find an old photo of Pollensa, Alcúdia, Sa Pobla, and the chances are that Bestard's name will be on it. He didn't confine himself to Pollensa and the surrounding area - he photographed the whole of the island - but he specialised in Pollensa, and his name is intrinsically linked to the town, and in more ways than you might imagine.

Guillem, or Guillermo if you prefer, got the photography bug when a German painter turned up in Pollensa in 1898. He was seventeen years old at the time. The Bestard family home was also an inn, and this painter was one of its guests. He introduced Guillem to the camera, and an astonishing legacy was about to be created.

His success as a photographer was not confined to taking photos of landscapes, of fishing villages and towns - ones with which many of you may well be familiar. He also did photographic portraits. The Infanta Isabel was one of his subjects in 1913. Two years before, he had photographed Antoni Maura, the Mallorcan who was prime minister of Spain on several occasions. Barely ten years after having picked up a camera, he received the gold medal for artistic photography at the international exhibition in Paris of 1910. Two years later, he received another international award in Paris and a couple more besides - in Brussels and Barcelona. He also photographed ordinary people. The Bestard archive is an indispensable record of Mallorca at the turn of the twentieth century and was, through successors, to become a record of the island until 2006.

Important though Bestard was, his photographic work was largely overlooked when it came to the promotion of Mallorca in the early years of the last century. Indeed, photography was generally not used; paintings were instead. But paintings, or rather painters - and it is here that the Bestard story begins to broaden - were to prove to be as much a part of the making of Bestard as his photographs.

In the 6 September, 1913 edition of the Mallorcan "La Almudaina" newspaper, there was an article entitled "Illustrious painters, today's guests in Mallorca". The article was subtitled "The Mecca for artists". The writer of the article was Pedro Ferrer Gibert. Three years later, it was he who was to coin the term "the Pollensa school", something which didn't physically exist but which was founded as an artistic movement around the time that the article appeared. (1914 is usually taken as the starting-point.)

Ferrer had taken himself off to Cala San Vicente, to the improvised Can Niu pension that was home to several of these "guests". He was accompanied by two painters - Antoni Gelabert and José Singala - and by a photographer, Guillem Bestard. There is a photo of these painters, fifteen of them in all. They are all smartly dressed. Had they put on their best bib 'n' tucker for Bestard's photo in the newspaper? Quite possibly. Though it isn't certain that this was a photo taken at that time, one presumes that it was.

Bestard was thus drawn into this artistic movement, one of which one can say, with no exaggeration, that it was fundamental in informing the world about Mallorca and in revealing to the world the magnificence of the island: the "island of calm", as one of these painters, Santiago Rusiñol, dubbed it.

His fame and reputation spread. Though photography might not have been used by the Mallorca Tourist Board at that time, his work still reached a wide audience. It was published in the Madrid daily "El Sol" but more significantly in "National Geographic", which proves that Bestard's role in the early years of promoting Mallorca's tourism, generally ignored, was of considerable importance.

In Pollensa, he became a pillar of local society. He co-founded the cultural Club Pollença in 1913 and became a director of the Colonya co-operative bank. He was, therefore, a close associate of Guillem Cifre de Colonya, someone with whom he shared liberal ideas. These ideas led him to leave Mallorca during the Civil War. He was later to return, but he lived primarily in London, where he died in 1969.

All I Want Is A Photograph Of You

Robert Cornelius has a niche in history. An early pioneer of photographic technology, a self-portrait of Cornelius was one of the first, if not the first, photo taken of a person. The year was 1839; the place, Philadelphia.

Cornelius, and other early-movers in the art and science of photography, would have had no idea what they were unleashing. Almost two centuries on, and the human race and its environment has become a continuum of incessant snapping. We are photography. Homo Kodakiens.

The camera is arguably the greatest invention ever. The technology has formed the basis for record and for revision, no more so than nowadays; digital photography makes images two-a-penny and photographic software can alter images in a way that Stalin's airbrushers could never have imagined.

In Mallorca, where would we be without the camera? It has benefited from the same brilliant light in capturing land- and seascapes as that which inspired the post-impressionist school of art in Pollensa in the early twentieth century. It has been the medium for thousands, millions of the photographic cliché: the view to and from the Calvari oratory in Pollensa town; the pine tree hanging off-centre of frame as the lens scans the sweep of Puerto Pollensa's pine walk; the shadow thrown onto the horse promontory of Cala San Vicente's "Cavall Bernat". The cliché of image is as repetitious as the superlatives of adjectives that describe the scenes with the unthinking rote-speak of brochures and websites.

As focused on and clicked as the scenery are the reproduced descendants of Robert Cornelius. People. Mallorcan society, in its widest sense, appears at times to exist for one purpose - to have its picture taken. Little of this is what you might call photo-journalism; it is imagery for the sake of imagery. Its repetitiousness, its pose-style is as loaded with déjà vu as the tourist snap of the pine walk or other so-called "iconic" landscapes.

One such is the photo of long tables, disappearing into the distance, at which are seated any number of uninteresting people with dreary expressions who have gathered together to eat something. There is a recent good example of the art; a Partido Popular lunch in Campos, with, in the foreground, María Salom and José Bauzá. It is the same shot as is regurgitated from the memory cards of suppers at annual fiestas. Who on earth cares?

Politicians are, naturally, the worst when it comes to muscling into frame. The default politician photo comprises several of them, standing shoulder to shoulder, inaugurating something, standing on a platform, making some declaration or other. Just one problem with these photos is that many of the subjects, the blokes especially, are so badly dressed. Jeans really aren't politician attire, but they are in Mallorca. And the wearers look as though they've just walked in from the fields or the building site, which is probably because they have.

No more idiotic in the formulaic, side-by-side, on-stage photo is one from Artà the other day. It looks as though the whole town is in it, celebrating the almost completely unnewsworthy fact that the town has finally got round to having a tourism website. I exaggerate the numbers. They are not the whole of Artà, but they are that great that they equate to a World Cup football squad. It is so supremely old-fashioned and silly, you half expect them to launch into a chorus of "Back Home". This is photography by parish newsletter, which just about sums up the level of local politics and the sophistication that it attracts and displays.

But worse, far worse, are the photos of alleged VIPs and celebrities. They form a constant collage of the dicky-bow, the low-slung, the suntan, the champagne flute and the expensive trip to the hairdressers. These are the snaps of the faux-"Hello", misguided notion that anyone is actually interested. They are interested, if the subjects happen to be famous, but not when they are the famous unfamous or the simply unfamous. Most you have neither heard of nor care about, and if you have heard of them, you would probably prefer not to have. It is these images, though, which speak more, far more about Mallorca than the landscape clichés. Well, about a Mallorca, at any rate.

In 1839, Robert Cornelius conducted an experiment. One would doubt that he had in mind his own vanity. But what he unleashed, other than merely matters of record, was the vanity of others. One does have to distinguish between the photographing of Mallorcan society and of society Mallorca. The latter is the domain of the vain and the vaininglorious. The act of the photographer is not to inform an audience but to bow to the bows and frills of the subject. But most of this act is irrelevant, superficial and shallow; as shallow as the subjects through the lens and with even less depth of focus.

All I want is a photograph of you, something to remind me. Actually, I don't.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.